


Draco Malfoy, Prisoner of Azkaban

by DoubleApple



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Azkaban, Canon Divergence - Post-Hogwarts, Dreams vs. Reality, Post-War, Suicidal Thoughts, Trauma, and skip this if you want or need to, it is not graphic but there is a brief mention of it, right in the beginning, so please be kind to to yourself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-10-10 08:02:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20524673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoubleApple/pseuds/DoubleApple
Summary: Draco is in prison. Harry is there, too, as a guard, or... something, Draco doesn’t know what exactly, but somehow that infuriating git and his bloody saviour complex always show up at Draco’s darkest moments.





	Draco Malfoy, Prisoner of Azkaban

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Quicksilvermaid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quicksilvermaid/gifts).

> Happiest of birthdays to you, my dear QSM! Hello and welcome to your surprise gift, a very sad fic about being imprisoned in a cell, devoid of hope, happiness, and human contact! 
> 
> But I couldn’t stop thinking about your Draco-in-Azkaban prompt — I didn’t take it exactly but, as per usual, your ideas are amazing and this one took hold.
> 
> I know you love the darkness, but I hope the coming year brings so much light into your life. Thank you for being such a bright spot in mine. <3

_Draco can smell the snow before he feels it. That ozone fragility in the air, its sharp heaviness like crystal waiting to crack. The promise of something impending._

_ Then he opens his eyes. _

—

Draco wanted to die in Azkaban. He dreamed of the fall, the long way down, of dashing himself against the rocks. Oblivion and freedom. Whatever lay beyond the Veil had to be better than this. 

But when he tried to stop eating and refused the vile food they pushed through the slat in his door twice a day, the guards shouted at him. The ones who didn’t shout hissed and sneered, threatened him with Dementors. The ones who didn’t sneer — they smiled as though they had a plan, and that was worse, so he choked down the food. He hated himself even more for his weakness.

They couldn’t make him talk, though, so he wouldn’t. Ever, at all. Including the first time Harry Potter showed up and invited himself into Draco’s cell. 

_What the ever-loving FUCK are you doing here, Potter _— is what he wanted to shout, but didn’t. If he could control nothing else, let him control this.

—

_Hogwarts, his dormitory, third year, the heavy hush of 3 am. Draco pads back from the loo to find his hangings open and Blaise seemingly sound asleep, a dark comma curved against the silvery sheen of the bedclothes. This isn’t the first time, or the second. Draco crawls in beside him, close but not touching, and pulls the coverlet on top of both of them. The darkness is not so dark, really, and it smells of boys and candlewax, parchment and laundry soap and other people’s sleep. Draco drifts off surrounded by softness, by safety. _

—

Draco didn't know he could sink any lower, six weeks out from the war, but he had. Potter kept coming back, talking to him from the hallway, and Draco hated it, hated being _seen_ like this. The humiliation still had the power to get under his skin and that’s just where he felt Potter's presence, like a constant itch, a low-grade burn just beneath the surface of his entire body. He scratched the backs of his wrists raw with the shame of it. He shivered.

"Are you cold?" Potter asked. 

Draco said nothing. Of course he was cold. It was always bloody cold. After Draco stayed silent and refused to look at him, Potter went away, and then it got colder.

But a few minutes later — or a few hours, or a day; who can tell — he came back with a blanket. It’s thick and warm He tried to hand it to Draco but he wouldn’t take it, and some little spark ignited in Potter's eyes. He looked terrible, Draco noticed, then; thin, dull, even his hair hanging limp, and Draco wondered what the last few weeks have been like for him as well. But he saw Potter eye the blanket, dangling there pathetically from his hand, and he saw the familiar challenge come into his eyes. His nostrils flared, just the tiniest bit. 

"Fine, then, Malfoy, you stubborn git." Potter said, quirking an eyebrow. He opened his hand and let the blanket fall to the dirt floor of the cell, turned to leave, and pulled the door shut behind him. 

And then Draco felt it: Potter had blown a warming charm through the food slat in the door. 

Draco barely recognised it, barely could recall what it felt like to be warm. It must have been late August at least, or September, but every moment in Azkaban is a freezing February rain, when everything’s gone gray and you’ve forgotten the sun completely. The warming charm was mid-July, a sunny afternoon in high summer, your face tipped toward the sun, eyes dazzled with that black-orange glow. Impossibly, deliciously warm. 

Potter’s summer magic seeped into his cell, into every dark crevice. He closed his eyes and was lost in it. 

—

_Sunshine. Draco burst outside and down a stone stairway, heedless, or at least as close to it as he ever got. Spring, summer. There’s a broom in his hand, somehow, and then he’s flying, clear blue sky, threads clouds skidding by on a hard summer breeze. He’s five stories up at least, dodging the thready clouds, wind in his face and his hair flying, away from the Manor and its stifling darkness, high enough that nothing can reach him but the sun. _

—

“Cheers, Malfoy.” Potter said it mirthlessly, his voice muffled on the other side of Draco’s cell door. He’d gone flat and cold. “It’s Yule, by the way. Thought I’d get you something extra.”

_How could it be Yule already,_ Draco thought, although he knew he’d lost track of the days and weeks in the freezing blankness of his cell. He wondered idly if Potter was lying and decided he didn’t care. Potter used warming charms every time he came, now, and he came often. Or maybe not, Draco didn’t know. 

But the next one had something extra in it, something that wasn’t just heat. Something of Potter himself, a breath of — what is that? A different warmth. A thicker one; not sun but a calm and crackling fire in a banked hearth. Woodsmoke and comfort. Something Draco wasn’t even sure he could name, that he hadn’t known himself. 

Draco’s eyes flew open in the middle of it, he couldn’t help it, he could _feel_ the difference. This wasn’t his imagination, or his memory, or whatever was passing for his queasy dreams that never really felt like dreams. This was from Potter himself.

And Potter sent some other sort of charm, not only warmth but pine needles and cocoa and wool scarves and it was so beautiful and real, _fuck_— Draco gasped, he couldn’t help it, and Potter must have been lingering outside his door because of course he heard it. 

"I knew it, you arsehole," he said, his tone quiet and inscrutable. "I knew you hadn’t gone mute entirely. Of course you _could_ talk, if you wanted. But fine. Suit yourself."

Potter whistled as he walked away. He fucking whistled, made the most incongruous sound of all in the halls of Azkaban, because of course, _of course_ he would. Draco strained to hear as it grew fainter and fainter still with every step. 

And the next time Potter came — it could have been hours or days or weeks, who knew — Draco forced himself to hold his eyes open as Potter cast. It was an impossible effort not to close them; the force of Potter’s magic was like a gale-force wind, and Draco was weary down to his bones. But he made himself watch as Potter stuck his wand, those famous eleven inches of holly, through the food slat to his cell. It wove complicated patterns in the air, with gentle sparks falling to the ground occasionally. Behind the door, Potter muttered loud enough that Draco could just make out a word or two of the incantations. He’d never heard them before. 

Color spread slowly across the walls of his cell. It dripped down, like paint or melting crayons, and blossomed up like plants growing at a hundred times their normal speed. Whole scenes bloomed in the cell in an instant. This one looked to be a garden with hedgerows and greenery everywhere, butterflies and hummingbirds. 

“The dampeners don’t work on me," Potter called to him through the slat, as Draco sat slackjawed and watched a lilac bush spread around his hand pressed flat to the wall. 

_Oh of course they fucking don’t_, Draco thought. _Laws for mere mortals and all that._

“Don’t say anything to anyone about it, yeah?” Potter added, anxious, belying a trace of the schoolboy he’d been not so long ago. The children they’d all been, the children they still should be.

Draco held back a snort. Who, pray tell, could he possibly speak to about this? He traced a lilac blossom on the wall and it bloomed beneath his finger, its scent releasing into the air. A tiny honeybee buzzed by. 

Outside his door, Potter was still talking. “I’ve been studying,” he tells Draco, the dullness that’s usually in his voice replaced with the tiniest spark of something else. Hope, or pride. “Leave it to you to get me to open a bloody book for the first time in ages. Hermione helped me learn this one."

Draco leaned his head back against the wall of the cell. It's preternaturally cold and damp, as though it had been charmed to stay that way, but as Potter's patterns spread across it, the garden grew behind his back and there was a hedgerow, prickly and substantial, but also sun-warmed and somehow inviting. He closed his eyes and smelled lilac, felt the sun on his face. 

Potter was still casting, but his voice grew softer. Draco swallowed hard against his throat closing. 

"You can tell me what you want, you know," Potter said, and at that, Draco lost his battle with his own will. He shut his eyes against the kindness in Potter’s voice. 

—

Over the next days, or weeks, or something, Potter spun out more and more scenes for him. They were all impossibly lovely, but then he started in on Hogwarts: Halloween, the Yule Ball, crossing the lake for the first time, the greenhouses, the last day of classes, the first. The Great Hall on an ordinary Tuesday morning, rashers of bacon and “that poncy passionfruit yoghurt that’s your favourite, Malfoy.” Draco, hidden as always by the walls of his cell, rolled his eyes. How did Potter bloody know what kind of yoghurt he preferred?

For weeks, it was nothing but Hogwarts. Over and over, in every season, so rich in remembered detail that Draco felt as though he — whose eyes were used to such luxuries — sometimes felt he was seeing them for the first time. 

Sometimes Potter came when Draco was asleep, and he’d awaken to the smell of snow or mountain air or the potions classroom or treacle tart, and he’d squeeze his eyes shut until they hurt just so he can prolong the anticipation of opening them and seeing the world Potter had spun out for him. Until one morning, when Draco was overwhelmed by exhaustion and fear. He saw Potter’s wand come through the slat and he moved close to it and thought, _the sea_

“What, Malfoy? Pardon?” Potter demanded. His wand disappeared and his voice grew louder; he must have pushed his face close to the slat. “Is that what you said? ‘The sea’?”

Draco’s eyes flew open and he clamped his mouth shut. He couldn't speak again. He thought he’d cried so much in his first few days in this wretched place that he’d never cry again, but suddenly his eyes burned and his throat closed, and he couldn’t speak even if he'd wanted to. So when Potter repeated, “the sea?” Draco just nodded, even though Potter was safely on the other side of the wall and couldn't see him. 

“The sea,” Potter said once more. “Fine, then, Malfoy. The sea. But I’m going to do it from inside this time, all right? I’m coming in.”

The heavy door swung open with a groan and there was Potter. Draco stared up at him and then, too late, scrambled to his feet. Potter hadn’t come in since that first time, their only contact through dreams and that sodding door slat, and Potter looked terrible and wonderful at the same time. Bedraggled and dirty, dragged down with the hopelessness of Azkaban and the aftermath of war and terror, of being alive when no one expected him to survive, of the vast emptiness of a future he didn’t think he’d have and wasn’t sure he wanted. 

But he was beautiful, too, the fire within him kindled bright like it always had been. His green eyes were wary, but they still shone under the dirty, shaggy fringe. 

Potter didn’t speak. Draco watched silently as he conjured, closing his eyes and allowing the magic to take him, wand extended, moving meditatively. Color issued forth from his wand as though he was unfurling a stream of water, sparks and jets, more complex than before.

When he’d finished, he paused a moment and opened his eyes. And then he smiled, open and childlike, proud of his creation. 

“All right, then, Malfoy. The sea.”

_They’re standing by the edge of a shore, somewhere. It reminds Draco of long-ago summer hols in the south of France, his mother off in the distance, seated beneath a palatial white umbrella along with some French cousins he never got on with. Draco is standing by the water. There’s salt air, sand, sun. He turns and Potter is standing next to him, breathing too, not looking at him but out at the horizon line where the water meets the sky. Draco can feel the sun on his face, the sand beneath his feet, Potter’s skin next to him. He takes a breath, more deeply than he has in months. _

And there, on Potter’s face, was a smile. Just a ghost of a thing, but Draco’s mouth twitched up to match it just the same, and he didn’t know where they were in time and space, exactly, he could see the sea and the cell too, but he felt better than he had in ages. 

_Thank you, Potter,_, he heard himself say, and the smile — improbably, impossibly — grew wider. 

“My pleasure, Malfoy.” Even Potter’s voice was cracked, just looking at him. “You’re looking well.” 

And then they were both laughing, an impossible sound in an impossible place, and Dementors were probably zipping toward them and it was going to end poorly, for bloody certain. 

But in that moment, they raised up their broken voices together, and they laughed.


End file.
